1 - 20 of 31 Works by icicaille
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Through the window Francis watched the shops and office buildings crawl by. A streetlight was out at one corner, and in the new dark the window showed his reflection. He wondered if that was how James saw him. A watery shadow, a face invisible in the light.
Francis takes a little blue pill on the way home from dinner. James doesn't know. Then they get stuck in traffic.
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Unless I see, he thought. Unless I put my finger. Unless I put my hand.
Francis performs a resurrection. Once, then nightly.
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Notes on the Minutes of a Court-Martial Held at Admiralty House, Whitehall, Beginning Monday, the Third Day of September, 1849, and Continued Till Tuesday, the Eighteenth Day of December, 1849 by icicaille for movebelow
Fandoms: The Terror (TV 2018)
03 Dec 2023
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Shortly after the termination of the court-martial, held at the Admiralty Hall of London, on Captain Francis R.M. Crozier, FRS FRAS, on the subject of his conduct, as captain of the failed expedition to the High North, two pamphlets, purporting to contain the proceedings in full made their appearance; but as one of them was confessedly defective, having been authored by an observer outside the court, and the other was evidently garbled, no notice was taken of either. Such omissions therefore called for those elucidations which will be found in the following pages; and which are submitted, in no other spirit, and to no other end, than to diminish the labours of the public, in forming their conclusions, and ultimately deciding upon the matters that those minutes embrace.
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Inside, Francis was easy to spot. He was sitting alone at a booth near the back, clutching at a clear plastic cup filled with lime-green slush, red-faced for all the wrong reasons, so painfully out of place among the hordes of uniformed schoolchildren and jerseyed twenty-somethings that James felt quite like an anthropologist discovering a new species. Perhaps that explained the heady shock of electricity presently irradiating his entire body.
Francis summons James to Taco Bell after receiving some upsetting news.
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“I would’ve thought,” Francis said, “you were capable of basic arithmetic, being a PhD and all.” His arm started pumping faster. The veins on his forearms stood up like sastrugi in snow. Or maybe tire tracks in mud.
A routine encounter in the empty office in the basement of Dease Hall.
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If nothing else, James was a professional. Complete shit at relationships, yes, a therapist’s magic ATM, yes, genuinely afraid to take the “Narcissistic Personality Disorder Quiz” Dundy once sent as a joke in case he scored in the highest percentile, yes, basically an all-around sad shell of a human being, yes, but a white-collar seducer. He’d hooked Francis already. Now it was just a matter of reeling him in.
The office lads make a bet, Francis surprises everyone with a secret crush, and James finds himself in very big trouble.
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One evening, James did not come home. Dawn came and went in a bleak burst of orange while Francis waited in the armchair, sipping occasionally from a glass of water.
James becomes a molly house regular. Francis despairs, then self-destructs.
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lost at last in the wind by icicaille for anactoriatalksback
Fandoms: The Terror (TV 2018)
08 Jun 2022
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The sky was still bruised black and blue when Francis woke. He stood over the bed and laid his thumb against the line of James’ jaw, rubbing gently, so James would know it wasn’t a ghost that had gone. Then James sighed like a good dream had got ahold of him and rolled over, one hand flung out into that empty cooling space. Francis put on his boots and left.
Francis Crozier learns to swim.
Series
- Part 2 of city of gold
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It was a living, alright, the way Francis saw it, but it wasn’t a life. A life was made of something other than dry red dust and the dregs of a whiskey bottle. When he imagined his grandparents, who he had never met, he thought, That there must have been a life. What they had belonged to them: six children, twelve acres of green Ulster farmland, a body that joined you in slumber and rolled over to touch you in the morning.
Texas, 1881. Francis Crozier is a cow boss who drinks to drown old hurts. James Fitzjames is a secretive city slicker from New York. Their paths cross at Coppermine Ranch.
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- Part 1 of city of gold
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“What do you reckon a pound of meat fetches at Smithfield these days?”
Hickey, Goodsir, the tent.
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I write you now a few lines from Portsmouth to say how we have been getting on. All going as well as I could wish and we have been busily employed preparing ourselves to ship out to Cadiz. Ready for sea tomorrow.
Being the correspondence of Captain Francis R.M. Crozier of the H.M.S. St. Vincent and Captain James Fitzjames of 26 Sussex Square, Brighton, between the years of 1849 and 1851.
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Everything was fresher and stronger in Marseille, in fact. A ripe fruit of a city that turned wasted bodies into men again.
A gift on a warm summer morning.
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Francis’ left thumb pressed in hard, rubbing until something quieted and then unspooled. When the pressure retreated, taking all the soreness with it, James sighed long and hard. Less a sigh, in fact, than an excavation of an ache deep in his chest. That had done it. Tomorrow’s march could be borne.
A foot rub at the end of the world.
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“Do you not see yourself, Francis? My God, you—” James flung his head back and exhaled through his teeth, long and low. “The way you look. It is unbearable.”
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“A place for men like us, you might say.”
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Francis did not think a bad-tempered back deserved much sympathy. There were others who had lost more, suffered worse. Those who lived, as he had, could not rightly grouse about so much as the weather. But when James said, “Let me,” thumbing at the divot in Francis’ spine, Francis could only murmur, “Go on.” James had a way of breaking open his deepest certainties.
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Five years of Christmas parties at Erebus Luxury Yachts.
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In the half-year since their return, Francis had become aloof, impassive, withdrawn. There was no logic to this strange metamorphosis. At Greenhithe, Francis had promised to look after him. Had told James: Come find me. Yet Francis had never been further out of reach.
On a cold spring day in 1849, Francis drops everything and flees London for his sister's farm in Ireland. James, hurt and hungry for answers, gives chase.
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“Where will you go, Francis?” James says. “When we’ve returned home?”
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Francis swirled the last dregs in his glass and peered into its depths. Some kind of grim satisfaction had come over him. “I’ll tell you what you want to hear,” he said. “For a certain price.” It was foolhardy beyond measure. Damning, even.